To thine own self be true

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

My Antonia

Lying in bed (just like Brian Wilson did) early the other morning and realizing something basic to writing, my own writing, and life experience.

Life itself is fundamentally made up of sound, image, and movement. Sound we are always hearing–from nature, ourselves, other people, music. So listening and speaking or expressing, too, as in the work and performances of vocalists, musicians and composers.

Image is made up of several types of imagery. Mostly image has to do with the eye and seeing, but more largely refers to all impressions on our senses. So, as described in one of my previous books, it pertains also to:
sight–visual images, hearing–aural images (also mentioned above as sound), smell–olfactory images, taste (gustatory images), touch (tactile images), temperature as in hot or cold (thermal images), and motion–kinesthetic images (something which is the third of the three main outlined pillars of human experience of this entry).

We sense the world and others in these six principal ways at all times. and if one is expressing or creating via these ways, one might be a musician, a painter or filmmaker, a perfume maker, a cook or restaurant owner, a therapist or lover, a dancer, and so forth. My point with sound and music is that it not only has a receptive function, but an expressive and potentially creative one as well.

Motion or movement seems to need a category unto itself and subsumes the other two in process. as I write this, blood and invisible energy flows through my mind, body, and fingers to type this sentence. Outside, the trees are moving and grass and plants beginning to grow this spring. I will be going out in the car to pick up plants and dirt to start the garden, pots, and planters this morning. Elsewhere, millions of others are moving even if they are still asleep. As George Harrison said, “Life goes on within you and without you” whether you are talking about microbiomes or asteroids. (BTW/Implicit in all process is movement and change.)

For me, I look back at my poems, in particular, and realize the creation of each piece uses sound, image, and suggests or represents movement. Movement right down to the inspiration for each selection, through its imaginative birth process, right through to you or someone else hearing or seeing it, and the movement, as manifested in reader or audience response made up of feeling, thought, and imaginative empathy. Again, movement involving sound and image as well. Three main things informing our lives, personal experience, writing, the arts, and the creative process of so many creators.

“Cheer up–it can only get worse.”

And ‘The End’ will be
the last thing you imagine.
For me, a long golden hour
and tranquil sea
flowing forever
out of my evening
spring dream.

My ascending
a full circle
much as Dickinson dreamt
because she could not stop.

The return to an embedded
childhood moment,
place and familiar faces
still somehow alive
and unchanged.
We remember one another
before I turn to
the horizon and calm sea
beckoning…

Well, something like this,
as certain as the
4 a.m. robin
singing sweetly alone,
unseen beyond
my open window
in the dark predawn
of returning self.

After dinner and croquet
we sat happy, content
with ourselves
family and world
in the grey backyard
calm of twilight.

The whoosh and cries
came too sudden
for knowing–
the stillness broken
by necessity and
nature’s fact.

The cedar shattered
with absurd terror
as the hawk tore
a path to just one
unready sparrow.

He cleared the bush
in nano-seconds,
his unreal shriek
of triumph lifting
supper, arcing now
an indifferent sky,
the random babe
ripped out of
the only life it had
ever dumbly known.

‘What was that?’ we asked
‘hawk or merlin?’
But exactitude no
longer mattered
in that eerie birdless-hush,
as we turned once more
in private doubt, lost
for words, and resumed
our game of Scrabble.

Who gaze at the sky
It is you who are wise
Only you who are wise.
–John Stewart, “Those Who Are Wise; Sunny Side by The Kingston Trio

This was the first blog entry back in August 2012 (with references to consciousness newly added).

Intent: A very basic meditation/sharing.

The other most basic blog meditations (short meditative prose pieces) are fo be found in the first several months of this blog’s evolution. More recent meditative entries are refinements and alternate expressions of earlier themes with new themes added as they naturally occur. *The early selections also contain linear linkages of ideas with example pieces from my own writing, mostly poetry.

………………………………………………………………….

Life being largely about the impact of the world on an individual and his/her consciousness.

Beginning with the flow of images, sounds, language, feelings, thoughts–various information via lived experience.

Received, filtered, organized, processed by the individual’s senses, body, mind, feelings via imagination, intelligence, and empathy.

Thereby generating important meanings, understandings, epiphanies including pattern recognition, meaning-making, personal understandings, and expression/sharing of same.

What might also be called the potential development of a consciousness and sensibility with resulting integrity, values, and style.

In short, what comprises a fully-realized, autonomous individual.

The more developed and multitudinous the consciousness and sensibility, the more interesting the person, the broader and richer the quality of experience and capacity for empathy, connectedness, expressiveness and creativity.

What is important, then, to any individual is obtaining and knowing the information that satisfies curiosity, that is wanted, needed, necessary, missing, missed in order to maintain ‘life-flow’, to ‘move forward’, to develop, and to grow.

Life’s information cannot be understood, expressed, and appreciated without language, thought, and feeling, and sometimes whatever missing experience.

Ultimately, throughout a day and life, whether one realizes it or not, one searches for the very information that is necessary to live more fully, freely, connectedly, and purposefully.

Vancouver, April 4-8, 2013
Following scenes from English Bay area, Stanley Park, van Duesen Garden, Queen Elizabeth Park

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